Modern gas turbines, especially aircraft engines, must satisfy the highest demands with respect to reliability, weight, power, economy, and operating service life. In the last decades, aircraft engines were developed especially in the civil sector, which fully satisfy the above demands and have achieved a high degree of technical perfection. In the development of aircraft engines, among other things, the material selection as well as the search for new suitable materials play a decisive role.
The most important materials used these days for aircraft engines or other gas turbines are titanium alloys, nickel alloys (also called super alloys) and high strength steels. The high strength steels are used especially for shaft parts and transmission parts and for compressor housings as well as turbine housings. Titanium alloys are typical materials for compressor parts, nickel alloys are suitable for the hot parts of the aircraft engine.
A very promising group of a new material for future generations of aircraft engines are so-called fiber reinforced composite materials. Modern composite materials include a carrier material, which can be embodied as a polymer matrix, a metal matrix, or a ceramic matrix, as well as fibers embedded in the carrier material. The present invention relates to a composite material in which the carrier material is embodied as a metal matrix. Such a material is also designated as a metal matrix composite, which is called MMC for short.
In connection with high strength MMC materials, in which titanium is utilized as a carrier material, the weight of components can be reduced by up to 50% relative to conventional titanium alloys. Fibers with high strength and a high modulus of elasticity are used as reinforcements.
It is already possible to produce weight-reduced components with good strength characteristics with the MMC materials known from the prior art. The MMC materials known from the prior art, however, have the disadvantage, that they do not have a sufficient strength especially with respect to transverse loads or more generally under torsional loads, in order to take-up or brace, with sufficient security, the high loads arising in gas turbines. Previously, no MMC materials, especially no MMC materials based on titanium or a titanium alloy, have been known from the prior art, which have a sufficient strength with respect to transverse loads or torsional loads.